Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry

Plato's discussions of rhetoric and poetry are both extensive and
influential. As in so many other cases, he sets the agenda for the
subsequent tradition. And yet understanding his remarks about each of
these topics—rhetoric and poetry—presents us with
significant philosophical and interpretive challenges. Further, it is
not initially clear why he links the two topics together so closely
(he suggests that poetry is a kind of rhetoric). Plato certainly
thought that matters of the greatest importance hang in the balance,
as is clear from the famous statement that “there is an old
quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic,
607b5–6). In his dialogues, both this quarrel and the related
quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric amount to clashes between
comprehensive world-views—those of philosophy on the one hand,
and of poetry or rhetoric on the other. What are these quarrels about?
What does Plato mean by “poetry” and
“rhetoric”? The purpose of this article is to analyze his
discussions of rhetoric and poetry as they are presented in four
dialogues: the Ion, the Republic, the
Gorgias, and the Phaedrus. Plato is (perhaps
paradoxically) known for the poetic and rhetoric qualities of his own
writings, a fact which will also be discussed in what follows.

A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe,
helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him
—Dylan
Thomas[1]

When we think of a philosophical analysis of poetry, something like a
treatise on aesthetics comes to mind. At a minimum, we would expect a
rigorous examination of the following: the characteristics that define
poetry; the differences between kinds of poetry (epic, tragic, lyric,
comic, and so forth); and the senses in which poetry is and is not
bound to representation, imitation, expression (which are possible
meanings of the classical Greek word “mimesis”) and
fiction.[2]
These complicated terms themselves require careful definition.
Equally rigorous and systematic remarks about the differences between
poetry and other art forms, such as music and painting, would be in
order, as would reflection on the relation between orally delivered
poetry (indeed, if we are to include performance, poetry that is in
one way or another enacted) and poetry communicated through the
written word. Aristotle's Poetics is an early, and now
classic, philosophical exploration of poetry along these sorts of
lines.

Plato's extensive discussions of poetry frustrate these expectations.
He did not write a treatise on the subject—indeed, he wrote no
treatises, and confined his thought to “dramatic”
dialogues that are themselves shaped poetically—and the remarks
he offers us both meander unsystematically, even within a single
dialogue, and branch off in what seem like strange directions, such as
into discussions about the corruption of self to which poetry
allegedly exposes its audience. And yet Plato clearly thought that
something of enormous importance hangs on his assessment of poetry,
something that goes significantly beyond getting the details of the
subject pinned down in a philosophically respectable fashion. One of
the most famous lines in the culminating sections of one of his most
famous dialogues announces that “there is an old quarrel between
philosophy and poetry” (Rep. 607b5–6), in support
of which Plato quotes bits of several obscure but furious
polemics—presumably directed by poets against
philosophers—such as the accusation that the opponent is a
“yelping bitch shrieking at her master” and “great
in the empty eloquence of fools”.
[3]
Indeed, much of the final book of the Republic is an attack
on poetry, and there is no question but that a quarrel between
philosophy and poetry is a continuing theme throughout Plato's
corpus.

The scope of the quarrel, especially in the Republic, also
indicates that for Plato what is at stake is a clash between what we
might call comprehensive world-views; it seems that matters of grave
importance in ethics, politics, metaphysics, theology, and
epistemology are at stake. He leads up to the famous line about the
quarrel by identifying the addressees of his critique as the
“praisers of Homer who say that this poet educated Greece, and
that in the management and education of human affairs it is worthwhile
to take him up for study and for living, by arranging one's whole life
according to this poet” (606e1–5). The praisers of Homer
treat him as the font of wisdom. Plato agrees that Homer is indeed the
educator of Greece, and immediately adds that Homer is “the most
poetic and first of the tragic poets.” Plato is setting
himself against what he takes to be the entire outlook—in
contemporary but not Plato's parlance, the entire “philosophy of
life”—he believes Homer and his followers have
successfully propagated. And since Homer shaped the popular culture of
the times, Plato is setting himself against popular culture as he knew
it. Not just that: the quarrel is not simply between philosophy and
Homer, but philosophy and poetry. Plato has in his sights all of
“poetry,” contending that its influence is pervasive and
often harmful, and that its premises about nature and the divine are
mistaken. He is addressing not just fans of Homer but fans of the sort
of thing that Homer does and conveys. The critique is presented as a
trans-historical one. It seems that Plato was the first to articulate
the quarrel in so sweeping a
fashion.[4]
It is noteworthy that in the Apology (23e), Socrates'
accusers are said to include the poets, whose cause Meletus
represents.

It is not easy to understand what Plato means by poetry, why it is an
opponent, whether it is dangerous because of its form or content or
both, and whether there is much of ongoing interest or relevance in
his account. Would his critique apply to, say, Shakespeare's
tragedies? To E. E. Cummings' or T. S. Eliot's poetry? These questions
are complicated by the fact that Plato was not (or, not primarily)
thinking of poetry as a written text read in silence; he had in mind
recitations or performances, often experienced in the context of
theater. Still further, when Socrates and Plato conducted their
inquiries, poetry was far more influential than what Plato calls
“philosophy.” Given the resounding success of Plato's
advocacy of “philosophy,” it is very easy to forget that
at the time he was advocating a (historically) new project in a
context swirling with controversy about the relative value of such
projects (and indeed about what “philosophy” means). By
contrast, poetry seems relatively marginal in today's large commercial
and liberal societies, in spite of the energetic efforts of figures
such as the recent American national Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky,
whereas media of which Plato knew nothing—such as television,
videos, and the cinema, literary forms such as the novel, and
information systems such as the World Wide Web—exercise
tremendous influence. Television and movie actors enjoy a degree of
status and wealth in modern society that transcends anything known in
the ancient world. Is Plato's critique marginalized along with
poetry?

In spite of the harshness, and in some ways the bluntness of Plato's
critique of poetry, he not only put his finger on deep issues of
ongoing interest, but also leavened his polemic in a number of
intriguing and subtle ways—most obviously, by writing philosophy
in a way that can, with proper qualifications, itself be called
poetic. The “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” is
justly famed and pondered: what is it about?

When we turn to the second theme under consideration, viz., rhetoric,
we find ourselves even more puzzled initially. What do philosophers
have to say about rhetoric? Generally speaking, very little
qua philosophers. Like all reflective people, philosophers
dislike rhetoric as it is commonly practiced, bemoan the decline of
public speech into mere persuasion and demagoguery, and generally
think of themselves as avoiding rhetoric in favor of careful analysis
and argument. “Rhetoric” tends to have a very negative
connotation, and for the most part means “mere
rhetoric.” As an object of academic study, the subject of
rhetoric seems best left to English professors who specialize in the
long history of manuals on techniques of persuasion and such.
Consequently, philosophers, especially in modernity, have had little
to say about rhetoric. By contrast, Aristotle devoted a book to the
topic. And Plato struggles with rhetoric—or sophistry as it is
sometimes also called, although the two are not necessarily
identical—repeatedly. We recall that Socrates was put to death
in part because he was suspected of being a sophist, a clever
rhetorician who twists words and makes the weaker argument into the
stronger and teaches others to do the
same.[5]
Plato's polemic against the sophists was so persuasive that, in
conjunction with a well established and ongoing popular hostility
towards sophistry (a hostility of which Socrates was, ironically, also
the object), we have come to use “sophist” as a term of
opprobrium meaning something like “mere rhetorician.” In
Plato's dialogues there is unquestionably an ongoing quarrel between
philosophy on the one hand and rhetoric and sophistry on the other,
and it too is justly famed and pondered. What is it about?

Once again, the question is surprisingly difficult. It is not easy to
understand why the topic is so important to Plato, what the essential
issues in the quarrel are, and whether rhetoric is always a bad thing.
We do recognize commendable examples of rhetoric—say, Pericles'
Funeral Oration, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, or Churchill's rousing
speeches during World War II. These were rhetorical, but were they
merely rhetorical, let alone sophistical? Still further, Plato's
Socrates is not above speaking to his interlocutors rhetorically at
times, even sophistically (some of his arguments against Thrasymachus
in book I of the Republic have been suspected of falling into
the latter category, and Socrates' interlocutors are occasionally
reported as feeling that he has played some kind of verbal trick on
them). And are not Plato's dialogues themselves rhetorical in
significant senses of the term?

These remarks prompt yet another question. However interesting the
topics of poetry and rhetoric may be, when we read Plato, why group
them together? Few people today would imagine that there is any
interesting relation between poetry and rhetoric. To think of great
poets as “rhetoricians” seems bizarre; and most (popular)
rhetoricians do not seem to know the first thing about poetry. Yet
Plato himself associates the two very closely: at Gorgias
502c he characterizes poetry as a kind of rhetoric. Thus Plato
provides our warrant for investigating the topics together. This
linkage between poetry and rhetoric is of course controversial, and
will be discussed below.

Quite clearly, our themes are very large in scope, and indeed nearly
every one of Plato's dialogues is relevant to one or more of them. The
present essay will confine itself to just four dialogues, the
Ion, Republic, Gorgias, and
Phaedrus. I will discuss them in that order, and in the final
section of the essay shall briefly examine the famous question of the
poetic and rhetorical dimension of Plato's own writings.

I shall look for connections between our four dialogues, though I do
not believe that our chosen texts present a picture of poetry and
rhetoric that is altogether unified (indeed, this could not be claimed
even of the Republic taken by itself). I will put aside the
question about which dialogue Plato composed at which time, along with
assumptions about the possible “development” of Plato's
views from “earlier” to “later” dialogues.
This is an example of an interpretive (or as it is sometimes called, a
“hermeneutical”) assumption; every reader of Plato
necessarily commits to interpretive assumptions. The debate about
which assumptions are best is an ongoing one, but not germane to the
present
discussion.[6]
It suffices here to state the relevant assumptions made in this
discussion.

The identity of “Socrates” is contested; we have no
writings by the historical figure, only writings by a number of
authors that in some sense or other—and the senses vary a great
deal—are either about him or creatively adapt his name and
aspects of his story. In referring to Socrates, I shall mean only the
figure as represented by Plato; nothing follows, for present purposes,
about the historical accuracy of Plato's depiction. Further, it is not
the case that the views Plato puts into the mouth of his Socrates are
necessarily espoused by Plato himself; they may or may not be those of
Plato. Since Plato did not write a treatise in his own voice, telling
us what his views are, it is impossible to know with certainty which
views he espouses (at least on the basis of the works he composed). In
several cases, one of which will be examined in the final section of
this essay, it seems reasonably clear that Plato cannot be
espousing without qualification a view that his Socrates is endorsing.
With these principles firmly in mind, however, I shall occasionally
refer (as I already have) to Plato as presenting this or that view.
For as author of all the statements and drama of the
dialogues, he does indeed present the views in question; and on
occasion it is convenient and simpler to say he is advocating this or
that position (for example, the position that there is an ancient
quarrel between philosophy and poetry).

Ion is a prize-winning professional reciter of poetry—a
“rhapsode”—and of Homer in
particular.[7]
Though he speaks his lines with the requisite conviction and emotion,
he does not “imitate” his subjects in the sense of act
their parts (of course, Homer did not write for the stage). He is a
performer but not a (stage) actor. Ion is depicted as superb at making
the Iliad and Odyssey come alive, at communicating
their drama to his audience and at involving them intimately. We might
say that he “represents” or “expresses” the
characters, action, and narrative of Homer's epic poems, and thus in
some sense both identifies with his subject and leads his audience to
do the same. As he puts it in the dialogue that bears his name: if he
has done his job well, he will find himself weeping when reciting
sorrowful lines, and expects to see his audience weep along with him
(535b1-e6). Both are somehow transported, thanks to Ion's superb
narrative capacity, into the original scene (as Socrates says, Ion is
“beside himself” and in the enthusiasm of the moment
thinks he is present at the scene he is describing; 535b7-c3).

But Ion thinks himself capable of yet more, for he also claims to be
an expert in explaining what Homer means. He's an exegete (see 531a7)
or interpreter par excellence, and this claim especially intrigues
Socrates. He does not permit Ion to actually exhibit his skills as a
rhapsode, and instead insists that he engage in give-and-take about
the abilities Ion claims to possess. This is typical of Socrates'
method; he forces his interlocutor to give an account of his
commitments and way of life. As both reciter and exegete, the rhapsode
has no exact analogue today. Nonetheless, the implications of the
Ion are broad; while Ion is not a poet himself, he bears
important traits in common with the poet.

The thrust of Socrates' initial questioning is revealing. Essentially,
he attempts to show that Ion is committed to several theses that are
not compatible with one another, unless a rather peculiar, saving
assumption is introduced. Ion claims that he is a first rate
explicator of Homer; that he is a first rate explicator only
of Homer, and loses interest as well as competence if another poet
(such as Hesiod) is brought up (531a3–4, 532b8–c2;
533c4–8); and that Homer discusses his subjects much better than
do any other poets (531d4–11, 532a4–8). Ion may justly be
thought of as one of the “praisers” of Homer referred to
in Republic X (see above, and Ion 542b4). Notice
that Socrates's first order of business is to get Ion to agree that a
number of claims are being made by him; while this may seem
obvious, it is an essential condition for Socrates' inquiry, and is a
distinctive characteristic of the sort of thing Socrates does as a
philosopher.

If Ion is an exegete or explicator of Homer's poems, he must surely
understand what the poet means, else he could not explain the poet's
thoughts. This seemingly commonsensical point is asserted by Socrates
at the start (530c1–5), and happily accepted by Ion. However, if
Ion understands what the poet says about X, and judges that
the poet speaks best about X, he must be in a position to
assess other poets' pronouncements about the subject in question. For
example, Homer talks a great deal about how war is waged; as an expert
on Homer who claims that Homer spoke beautifully about that subject
(in the sense of got it right), Ion must be in a position to explain
just how Homer got it right and how Hesiod, say, got it wrong, as a
series of simple analogies show. If you can knowledgeably
(531e10) pick out a good speaker on a subject, you can also pick out
the bad speaker on it, since the precondition of doing the former is
that you have knowledge of the relevant subject matter. But this seems
to contradict Ion's assertion that he can explain only Homer, not the
other poets.

Let us recapitulate, since the steps Socrates is taking are so
important for his critique of poetry (it is noteworthy that at several
junctures, Socrates generalizes his results from epic to dithyrambic,
encomiastic, iambic, and lyric poetry; 533e5–534a7,
534b7–c7). To interpret Homer well, we have to understand what
Homer said; to do that, and to support our judgment that he spoke
superlatively well, we have to understand the subject matter about
which Homer speaks (just as we would in, say, evaluating someone's
pronouncements about health). Further, Homer himself must have
understood well that about which he speaks. As interpreters or
assessors, we are claiming to be experts judging a claim (in this case
Homer's) to expertise, just as though we were members of a medical
examination board considering an application to the profession. So as
interpreters we are making claims about the truth of Homer's teachings
about XYZ; and thus we are assuming that Homer sought to
state the truth about XYZ. Given that he discusses the
central topics of human and godly life (531c1-d2), it would seem that
Homer claims to be wise, and that as his devoted encomiasts we too
must be claiming to be wise (532d6-e1). But claims to wisdom are
subject to counter-claims (the poets disagree with each other, as
Socrates points out); and in order to adjudicate between them, as well
as support our assessment of their relative merits, we must open
ourselves to informed discussion both technical and philosophical.
Technical, because on subjects such as (say) war-making, the general
should be consulted about the accuracy of Homer's description thereof;
philosophical because both the method of assessing the whole (the
“Socratic method”) and the comprehensive claims about the
truth made by interpreter and poet, are properly philosophical
preoccupations for Plato.

It is but a step from there to the proposition that neither Ion nor
Homer can sustain their claims to knowledge, and therefore could not
sustain the claim that the poems are fine and beautiful works. In
passage after passage, Homer pronounces on subjects that are the
province of a specialized techne (art or skill), that is, a
specialized branch of knowledge. But neither the rhapsode nor Homer
possesses knowledge of all (or indeed perhaps any) of those
specialized branches (generalship, chariot making, medicine,
navigation, divination, agriculture, fishing, horsemanship, cow
herding, cithara playing, wool working, etc.). Ion attempts to resist
this by claiming that thanks to his study of Homer, he knows what a
general (for example) should say (540d5). Since he has accepted that
this would involve possessing the art of generalship (541e2,
techne kai episteme), his claim is patently indefensible, and
Socrates charges that he has failed to make good on his assertion to
be “wonderfully wise … about Homer” (542a1).

So Ion, and by extension Homer, are faced with a series of unpalatable
alternatives:

They could continue to defend the claim that they really do know
the subjects about which they discourse—in the sense of possess
the techne kai episteme of them, i.e., a mastery of the
subject matter. Yet if they do defend that claim they will be liable
to examination by relevant experts.

They could admit that they do not know what they are talking
about. This admission could be understood in several ways:

(b.1) one would amount to saying that while lacking in technical
knowledge (knowledge of this or that craft or skill), they do have
knowledge of human affairs—something like knowledge of human
nature, of how human life tends to go, of the relation between (say)
virtue and happiness, as well as of the natures of both virtue and
happiness. To this might be added the claim that the poets and their
exponents know the nature of the cosmos and of the divine. In the
Republic Socrates in effect allows them comprehensive claims
to knowledge along those lines, and then attacks across the board,
seeking to show that the poets have got it wrong on all important
counts.

(b.2) alternatively, they could admit that they do not have either
technical or non-technical knowledge of any of the topics about which
they sing; rather, they possess the skill (techne) of
creating beautiful, persuasive, and moving images of the subjects in
question. So when Ion claims that Homer speaks beautifully about X, he
just means that Homer speaks beautifully in a rhetorical sense even
though he (Homer) does not necessarily know what he is talking about.
By extension, the poet would (on this interpretation) make the same
claim about himself. This would seem to reduce them to rhetoricians,
which in effect is what Socrates argues in the Gorgias, with
the further proviso that rhetoric as popularly practiced is not even a
techne. Poetry-as-mere-rhetoric is not a promising credential
for authority either to educate all of Greece or to better one's
audience; (b.2) is not a position that poets or their rhapsodes would,
presumably, be eager to adopt.

(b.3) Ion could admit that he knows nothing about the topics Homer
addresses, withdrawing his claim to be a knowledgeable exegete, but
maintain that Homer himself knows what he's talking about. Ion would
be liable to the question as to how he knows all that,
however; and in any case would at best shift Socrates' attack to the
real target, viz. Homer.

(b.4) Socrates provides a seemingly more palatable alternative in the
Ion, one that is echoed in the Phaedrus (245a); this
is the “peculiar, saving assumption” mentioned above. It
consists in the thesis that Ion recites (and Homer composes) not from
knowledge but from divine inspiration. Neither knows what he
is saying, but is nonetheless capable of speaking or composing
beautifully thanks to the divine. They are like the worshippers of
Bacchus, out of their right minds (534b4–6). This creative
madness, as we might call it, they share with other Muse-inspired
artists as well as prophets and diviners (534b7-d1). This is supposed
to explain why Ion can recite only Homer beautifully; he's been
divinely inspired only in that area, and that is all he means when he
says that Homer is better than his rival poets. Ion has no
argument to support what looks like a comparative assessment;
it is just a report to the effect that he is “possessed”
by Homer's magic thanks to the work of a god. A poet, further, is not
a knower, but a kind of transmitter of a divine spark; he or she is
“an airy thing, winged and holy” (534b3–4). The
spark is generated by the god, and is passed down through the poet to
the rhapsode and then to the audience. In Socrates' unforgettable
simile, the relationship of the god to poet to rhapsode to audience is
like a magnetized sequence of rings, each of which sticks to the next
thanks to the power of the divine magnet at the start
(535e7–536b4), as though they were links in a chain (as we might
put it).

This simile helps to answer an important question: why should we care
whether or not the poets know what they are talking about, if we enjoy
their compositions? Socrates' answer is that as the last link on this
chain of inspiration, we are capable of being deeply affected by
poetry. We “spectators” at the recital too lose our minds,
to some degree, weeping or laughing as we enter into the narrated
scene, seemingly forgetting our real selves and lives (535b2-d9). In
the Ion he doesn't offer a further explanation of how this
effect is supposed to happen—for that, we will turn to the
Republic—but the important point is that it does
happen. It would seem that the audience is transformed by the
experience in a way that momentarily takes them out of themselves.
Perhaps it does not leave them as they were, for their understanding
of what properly elicits their grief or their laughter would seem to
be shaped by this powerful experience, an experience they presumably
repeat many times throughout childhood and beyond. Perhaps they too
start to believe—as Ion and possibly the poet do—that they
“know” something thanks to their contact with the divine,
such as how war is to be conducted and for what ends, what fidelity in
love means, or the character of the gods. None of this would matter
much if superb poetry left us unmoved, or in any case as we were.
Plato's critique depends on the assumption that poetry can and does
shape the soul.

The “divine inspiration” thesis resolves some problems for
Ion (and implicitly for Homer) while postponing others. One problem is
indicated by the last few lines of the dialogue, where Socrates offers
Ion a choice: either be human, and take responsibility for unfairly
avoiding his questions about the nature of his (Ion's) wisdom; or
accept the label “divine” and subscribe to the inspiration
thesis. Ion chooses the latter on grounds that it is
“lovelier.” It is an invitation to hybris, of course. How
easy it would be to confuse divine and human madness (to borrow a
distinction from the Phaedrus 244a5–245c4)! And not all
of the contenders for the prize Ion has won could be equally worthy of
promotion to divine status. By contrast, Socrates characterizes
himself in the Apology as not thinking he knows what he does
not know, as possessing human rather than divine
“wisdom.”[8]
Finally, since the poets and their rhapsodes both present views about
how things are and ought to be, and seek to persuade their auditors of
the same, they cannot escape responsibility for the implicit claim to
wisdom and authority they make. For Plato, this means that they must
be held accountable. It is philosophy's mission to force them to give
an account of themselves, and to examine its soundness. This would
mean that they are required to engage philosophy on its turf, just as
Ion has somewhat reluctantly done. The legitimacy of that requirement
is itself a point of contention, it is one aspect of the quarrel
between philosophy and
poetry.[9]

In order to respond to the famous challenge put to Socrates by Glaucon
and Adeimantus, it is necessary to define justice. Socrates suggests
that the task would be easier if justice were first sought in a polis,
where it is “writ large.” That strategy accepted, the
polis must be created in speech. It turns out that philosophic
guardians are to rule the polis, and the next question concerns their
education (376e2). The critique of poetry in the Republic
grows out of a consideration of the proper education (from their
childhood on) of the philosopher-guardians in the “city in
speech.” The context for the critique is therefore that of the
specific project of the Republic, and this raises a question
as to whether the critique is meant to hold whether or not the
“city in speech” is possible or desirable.

The concern in book II is very much with the proper education of a
citizen, as befits the project of creating a model city. The
“myth makers” (377b11; Bloom translates “makers of
tales”) who supply the governing stories of the day are like
painters (377e2) who make pictures of heroes and gods, and indeed of
the relations both among and between the two. From the outset,
Socrates treats the poems (those by Hesiod and Homer are singled out,
but the critique isn't meant to be confined to them) as though they
contained not just falsehoods, but falsehoods held up as models of
good behavior. The poems are taken as educational and thus broadly
political texts; persuasion (see 378c7) of a class of the young is
very much at stake. The young cannot judge well what is true and
false; since a view of things taken on at early age is very hard to
eradicate or change, it is necessary to ensure that they hear only
myths that encourage true virtue (378d7-e3). The pedagogic motivation
in question certainly extends beyond the specific “city in
speech” the Republic creates. Thus while the critique
of poetry in book II and beyond is in this sense shaped by the
contextual concerns, it is not limited to them.

Further, Socrates takes aim at the content of several
particularly influential poems, and his arguments against that content
do not depend, here, on the project of creating the “best
city.” One of his first targets is what he calls their
“theology” (379a5–6). Whether in epics, lyrics or
tragedies, whether in meter or not (379a8–9, 380c1–2), god
must be described accurately, and that turns out to be as unchanging;
as good and the cause of only good; as incapable of violence; and as
“altogether simple and true in deed and speech,” for god
“doesn't himself change or deceive others by illusions,
speeches, or the sending of signs either in waking or dreaming”
(382e8–11). For “there is no lying poet in a god”
(382d9). In short, the gods accurately conceived are remarkably
similar to what Socrates will subsequently call, in Republic
V-VII, the “Ideas.” Quite obviously, the dominant
“theological” foundation of the world-view prevalent in
fourth and fifth century Greece—and also any theological view
that does not meet the strictures Socrates specifies—must be
abandoned. The scope of the critique is breathtaking.

Along the way Socrates makes yet another point of great importance,
namely that the poets ought not be permitted to say that those
punished for misdeeds are wretched; rather, they must say that in
paying a (just) penalty, bad men are benefited by the god
(380b2–6). Socrates is starting to push against the theses that
bad people will flourish or that good people can be harmed. The cosmos
is structured in such a way as to support virtue. Socrates is
attempting to undermine what one might call a “tragic”
world view (note that in book X, he characterizes Homer as the
“leader” of tragedy; 598d8).

In book III Socrates expands the argument considerably. The concern
now is squarely with poetry that encourages virtue in the souls of the
young. Courage and moderation are the first two virtues considered
here; the psychological and ethical effects of poetry are now
scrutinized. The entire portrait of Hades must go, since it is neither
true nor beneficial for auditors who must become fearless in the face
of death. Death is not the worst thing there is, and all depictions of
famous or (allegedly) good men wailing and lamenting their misfortunes
must go (or at least, be confined to unimportant women and to bad men;
387e9–388a3). The poets must not imitate (see 388c3 for the
term) gods or men suffering any extremes of emotion, including
hilarity, for the strong souls are not overpowered by any emotion, let
along any bodily desire. Nor do they suffer from spiritual conflict
(391c). The rejection of the “tragic” world view becomes
explicit: neither poets nor prose writers should be allowed to say
that “many happy men are unjust, and many wretched ones just,
and that doing injustice is profitable if one gets away with it, but
justice is someone else's good and one's own loss.” Anybody
pronouncing on any of these topics—poetically or not—must
say the opposite (392a13-b6). In expanding the scope of the relevant
discourse so broadly, Socrates in effect lays down requirements for
all persuasive discourse—for what he elsewhere calls
“rhetoric”—and makes poetry a subsection
thereof.

Having covered the issue of content, Socrates turns to the
“style” (“lexis,” 392c6), or as we might say,
of the “form” of myth tellers or poets (Socrates again
runs these two together). He does so in a way that marks a new
direction in the conversation. The issue turns out to be of deep
ethical import, because it concerns the way in which poetry
affects the soul. Up until now, the mechanism, so to speak, has been
vague; now it becomes a little bit clearer. Poetic myth tellers convey
their thought through a narrative (diegesis) that is either
“simple” (haplos) or imitative (that is,
accomplished through “mimesis”). The notion of
mimesis, missing from the Ion, now takes center
stage. When the poet speaks in his own voice, the narrative is
“simple”; when he speaks through a character, as it were
concealing himself behind the mask of one of his literary creations,
the narrative is imitative or mimetic. For then the poet is likening
himself to this character, and trying to make the audience believe
that it's the character speaking. Some poetry (comedy and tragedy are
mentioned) proceeds wholly by imitation, another wholly by simple
narration (dithyrambs are mentioned), and epic poetry combines the two
forms of narrative.

What follows this classificatory scheme is a polemic against
imitation. The initial thesis is that every person can do a fine job
in just one activity only. Consequently, nobody can do a fine job of
imitating more than one thing (for example, an actor cannot be a
rhapsode, a comic poet cannot be a tragic poet, if any of these is
finely done). Imitation is itself something one does, and so one
cannot both imitate X (say, generalship) well and also do the activity
X in question (394e-395b). It has to be said that this thesis is set
out with little real argument. In any case, the best souls (the
guardians, in this case, in the city in speech) ought not imitate
anything.

And were they to imitate anything, every care must be taken that they
are ennobled rather than degraded as a result. Why? If imitations
“are practiced continually from youth onwards,” they
“become established as habits and nature, in body and sounds and
in thought” (395d1–3). Unlike simple narrative, mimesis
poses a particular psychic danger, because as the speaker of the
narrative one may take on the character of literary persona in
question. It is as though the fictionality of the persona is
forgotten; in acting out a part one acts the part, and then one begins
to act (in “real life”) as the character would act. One
does not actually take oneself to be the fictional character;
rather, the “model” or pattern of response or sentiment or
thought one has acted out when “imitating” the character
becomes enacted. There is no airtight barrier between throwing
yourself (especially habitually) into a certain part, body and soul,
and being molded by the part; no firm boundary, in that sense, between
what happens on and off the stage. By contrast, Socrates argues, a
simple narration preserves distance between narrator and narrated.

Before passing onto critiques of music and gymnastic, Socrates
concludes this section of his critique of poetry with the stipulation
that a poet who imitates all things (both good and bad) in all styles
cannot be admitted into the good
polis.[10]
However, a more “austere” poet and myth teller is
admissible, for he confines himself to imitating decent people (when
he imitates at all, presumably as infrequently as possible), thus
speaking pretty much in the same tone and rhythm, and who accurately
represents the nature of the gods, heroes, virtue, and other issues
discussed in books II and III
(398a1-b4).[11]

This critique of mimetic poetry has struck not a few readers as a bit
strange and obtuse, even putting aside the question of the legitimacy
of censorship of the arts. It seems not to distinguish between the
poet, the reciter of the poem, and the audience; no spectatorial
distance is allowed to the audience; and the author is allowed little
distance from the characters he is representing. All become the
speakers or performers of the poem when they say or think the lines;
and speaking the poem, taking it on as it were, is alleged to have
real effects on one's dispositions.

In book II the critique of poetry focused on mimesis understood as
representation; the fundamental point was that poets misrepresent the
nature of the subjects about which they write (e.g., the gods). They
do not produce a true likeness of their topics. In book III, the focus
shifts to mimesis understood as what one commentator has called
“impersonation”; participating in the
“imitation” by taking on the characters imitated was
viewed as corrupting in all but a few cases of poetic
mimesis.[12]
Surprisingly, in book X Socrates turns back to the critique of
poetry; even more surprisingly, he not only mischaracterizes the
results of the earlier discussion (at 595a5 he claims that all of
poetry that was imitative was banished, whereas only part of it was
banished; 398a1-b4), but recasts the critique in very different terms.
This is due in part to the fact that the intervening discussion has
seen the introduction of the “theory of Forms,” a more
elaborate analysis of the nature of the soul, and a detailed
description of the nature of philosophy. The renewed criticism leads
up to the famous statement that there exists an ancient quarrel
between poetry and philosophy.

Book X starts us off with a reaffirmation of a main deficiency of
poets: their products “maim the thought of those who hear
them.” And by means of the following schema, this is now
connected to a development of the allegation (repeated at
602b6–8) that poets do not know what they are talking about.
Socrates posits that there are Forms (or Ideas) of beds and tables,
the maker of which is a god; there are imitations thereof, namely beds
and tables, produced by craftsmen (such as carpenters) who behold the
Forms (as though they were looking at blueprints); thirdly, there are
imitators of the products of the craftsmen, who, like painters, create
a kind of image of these objects in the world of becoming. The
tripartite schema presents the interpreter with many
problems.[13]
Certainly, Socrates does not literally mean that poets paint verbal
pictures of beds and tables. Subsequently, the scheme is elaborated so
as to replace the craftsmen with those who produce opinion in the city
(legislators, educators, military commanders, among others), and the
painters with “the first teacher and leader of all these fine
tragic things” (595b10-c2), that is, Homer. The poets are
therefore “at the third generation from nature” or
“third from a king and the truth” (597e3–4,
6–7).

Let us focus on one of the implications of this schema, about which
Socrates is quite specific. The poets don't know the originals of
(i.e., the truth about) the topics about which they discourse; they
appear to be ignorant of that fact; and even worse, just as a
trompe-l'oeil painting can deceive the naïve onlooker
into believing that the imitation is the original, so too
those who take in poetry believe they are being given truth. Imitation
now starts to take on the sense of
“counterfeit.”[14]
Unequipped to put claims to knowledge to the test, the audience buys
into the comprehensive picture of “all arts and all things human
that have to do with virtue and vice, and the divine things too”
that the poet so persuasively articulates (598b-599a). The fundamental
point is by now familiar to us: “For it is necessary that the
good poet, if he is going to make fair poems about the things his
poetry concerns, be in possession of knowledge when he makes his
poems” (598e3–5). Even putting aside all of the matters
relating to arts and crafts (technai such as medicine), and
focusing on the greatest and most important things—above all,
the governance of societies and the education of a human
being—Homer simply does not stand up to examination (599c-600e).
All those “skilled in making” (tous poietikous),
along with this educator of Greece and leader of the tragic poets, are
painted as “imitators of phantoms of virtue and of the other
subjects of their making” (600e4–6).

And what, apart from their own ignorance of the truth, governs their
very partial perspective on the world of becoming? Socrates implies
that they pander to their audience, to the hoi polloi
(602b3–4). This links them to the rhetoricians as Socrates
describes them in the Gorgias. At the same time, they take
advantage of that part in us the hoi polloi are governed by;
here Socrates attempts to bring his discussion of psychology,
presented since book III, to bear. The ensuing discussion is
remarkable in the way in which it elaborates on these theses.

The example which introduces the last stage of Socrates' critique of
poetry prior to the famous announcement of the “quarrel”
is that of deep human suffering; specifically, a parent's loss of a
child (603e3–5). How would a decent person respond to such a
calamity? He would fight the pain, hold out against it as much as
possible, not let himself be seen when in pain, would be ashamed to
make a scene, and would keep as “quiet as possible”
knowing that none of the human things is “worthy of great
seriousness.” Being in pain impedes the rule of reason, which
dictates that when we are dealt misfortunes, we must be as unaffected
by them as possible, preserving the harmony of our souls (603e-604e).
Socrates sketches the character of the decent and good person this
way: “the prudent and quiet character, which is always nearly
equal to itself, is neither easily imitated nor, when imitated, easily
understood, especially by a festive assembly where all sorts of human
beings are gathered in a theater. For imitation is of a condition that
is surely alien to them” (604e). This may be a sketch of
Socrates himself, whose imitation Plato has
produced.[15]

By contrast, the tragic imitators excel at portraying the psychic
conflicts of people who are suffering and who do not even attempt to
respond philosophically. Since their audience consists of people whose
own selves are in that sort of condition too, imitators and audience
are locked into a sort of mutually reinforcing picture of the human
condition. Both are captured by that part of themselves given to the
non-rational or irrational; both are most interested in the condition
of internal conflict. The poet “awakens this part of the soul
and nourishes it,” producing a disordered psychic regime or
constitution (politeia, 605b7–8; compare this language
to that of the passages at the end of book IX of the
Republic). The “childish” part of the soul that
revels in the poet's pictures cannot distinguish truth from reality;
it uncritically grants the poet's authority to tell it like it is.
Onlookers become emotively involved in the poet's drama.

Another remarkable passage follows: “Listen and consider. When
even the best of us hear Homer or any other of the tragic poets
imitating one of the heroes in mourning and making quite an extended
speech with lamentation, or, if you like, singing and beating his
breast, you know that we enjoy it and that we give ourselves over to
following the imitation; suffering along [‘sympaschontes’,
a word related to another Greek word, ‘sympatheia’] with
the hero in all seriousness, we praise as a good poet the man who most
puts us in this state” (605c10-d5). So the danger posed by
poetry is great, for it appeals to something to which even the
best—the most philosophical—are liable, and induces a
dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in the
emotions in question (above all, in sorrow, grief, anger,
resentment).

As one commentator aptly puts it, “on the one hand, poetry
promotes intrapsychic conflict; on the other, it keeps us unconscious
of that conflict, for the irrational part of our psyche cannot hear
reason's corrections. That is why poetry, with its throbbing rhythms
and beating of breasts, appeals equally to the nondescript mob in the
theater and to the best among us. But if poetry goes straight to the
lower part of the psyche, that is where it must come
from.”[16]
Further, the picture of the gods that the Greek poets painted was a
projection of the tumultuous and conflictual lower parts of the soul,
one which in turn gave sustenance and power to those very same parts
of the soul.

The worry, then, is that in experiencing the emotions
vicariously—by identifying, so to speak, with the drama—we
release emotions better regulated by reason, and become captive to
them in “real” life. In a psychological sense, drama
supplies what today we would call “role models.” Socrates'
point is not that we think the drama is itself real, as though we
cannot distinguish between what takes place on and off the stage; but
that “the enjoyment of other people's sufferings has a necessary
effect on one's own.” Why? “For the pitying part [of the
soul], fed strong on these examples, is not easily held down in one's
own sufferings”
(606b).[17]
And this applies to comedy as well; we get used to hearing shameful
things in comic imitation, stop feeling ashamed at them, and indeed
begin to enjoy them
(606c).[18]
Socrates quite explicitly is denying that aesthetic
“pleasure” (606b4) can be insulated from the ethical
effects of poetry. To put the point with a slight risk of anachronism
(since Plato does not have a term corresponding to our
“aesthetics”), he does not think that aesthetics is
separable from ethics. He does not separate knowledge of beauty and
knowledge of good. It is as though the pleasure we take in the
representation of sorrow on the stage will—because it is
pleasure in that which the representation represents (and not just a
representation on the stage or in a poem)—transmute
into pleasure in the expression of sorrow in life. And that is not
only an ethical effect, but a bad one, for Plato. These are
ingredients of his disagreements on the subject with Aristotle, as
well as with myriad thinkers since
then.[19]
He is asserting, though without filling out the psychological
mechanisms in the detail for which one would wish, that from childhood
up, mimesis shapes our images and our fantasies, our unconscious or
semi-conscious pictures and feelings, and thereby shapes our
characters, especially that part of our nature prone to what he thinks
of as irrational or non-rational.

The poets help enslave even the best of us to the lower parts of our
soul; and just insofar as they do so, they must be kept out of any
community that wishes to be free and virtuous. Famously, or
notoriously, Plato refuses to countenance a firm separation between
the private and the public, between the virtue of the one and the
regulation of the other. What goes on in the theater, in your home, in
your fantasy life, are connected. Poetry unregulated by philosophy is
a danger to soul and
community.[20]

The argument in book X cuts across all forms of “poetry,”
whether tragic, comic, lyric, in meter or not; indeed, the earlier
distinction between imitative and narrative poetry too seems
irrelevant here. The conclusion is the same: “We are, at all
events, aware that such poetry mustn't be taken seriously as a serious
thing laying hold of truth, but that the man who hears it must be
careful, fearing for the regime in himself, and must hold what we have
said about poetry” (608a6-b2). So sweeping a conclusion makes
many assumptions, of course, one of which is that there is such as
thing as “truth” out there, and the theory of Forms or
Ideas is part of the metaphysical foundation of that view. The poets
have been characterized as making claims to truth, to telling it like
it is, that are in fact—contrary to appearances—little
more than the poet's unargued imaginative projections whose tenability
is established by their ability to command the applause of the
audience. That is, the poets are rhetoricians who are, as it were,
selling their products to as large a market as possible, in the hope
of gaining repute and influence.

The tripartite schema of Idea, artifact, and imitator is as much about
making as it is about imitation. Making is a continual thread
through all three levels of the schema. The Ideas too are said to be
made, even though that is entirely inconsistent with the
doctrine of Ideas as eternal expressed earlier in the
Republic itself (and in all the other Platonic dialogues).
The suggestion is arguably that the poets are makers (see also
599a2–3, where we are told that poets “produce
appearances,” as one might translate), that they move in a world
permeated by making. The word “poetry” in Platonic Greek
comes from the word “to make” (poiein), a fact
upon which Socrates remarks in the
Symposium.[21]
Making takes place in and contributes to the world of becoming.
Philosophers, by contrast, are presented as committed to the pursuit
of truth that is already “out there,” independently of the
mind and the world of becoming. Their effort has to do with discovery
rather than making. Thus stated the contrast is crude, since poets
also reflect what they take their audience to (want to) feel or
believe—they “imitate” in the sense of represent as
well as express—and philosophers make speeches and (as Socrates
himself says) they too
imitate.[22]
Nonetheless, the distinction suggests an interesting possibility,
viz. that the quarrel between poetry and philosophy is finally, in
Plato's eyes, about the relative priority of making and discovery. The
making/discovery distinction chimes with a number of the dichotomies
upon which we have touched: imagination vs. reason, emotion vs.
principle, becoming vs. being, artifacts vs. Forms, images vs.
originals.

Nowhere in the Republic does Socrates mention the poet's
claim to inspiration. Indeed, that claim is pointedly omitted in the
passage in which Socrates talks about the beginnings of the
Iliad (392e2–393a5; see Bloom's note ad loc).
Socrates implicitly denies the soundness of that claim here. Given his
conception of the divine as Idea, such a claim could not be true,
since the Ideas do not speak, let alone speak the things which Homer,
Hesiod, and their followers recount. The result is that the poets are
fabricators even of the appearance of knowing what they are talking
about; this is not inconsistent with the Ion's
characterization of poetry as inspired ignorance.

Does the critique of poetry in the Republic extend beyond the
project of founding the just city in speech? I have already suggested
an affirmative answer when discussing book II. The concerns about
poetry expressed in books III and X would also extend beyond the
immediate project of the dialogue, if they carry any water at all,
even though the targets Plato names are of course taken from his own
times. It has been argued that the authority to speak truth that poets
claim is shared by many widely esteemed poets since
then.[23]
It has also been argued that the debate about the effects on the
audience of poetry continues, except that today it is not so much
poets strictly speaking, but the makers of others sorts of images in
the “mass media,” who are the culprits. Controversies
about, say, the effects of graphic depictions of violence, of the
degradation of women, and of sex, echo the Platonic worries about the
ethical and social effects of art. At least in cases such as these, we
retain Plato's skepticism about the notion of “aesthetic
distance.”[24]

The Gorgias is one of Plato's most bitter dialogues in that
the exchanges are at times full of anger, of uncompromising
disagreement, plenty of misunderstanding, and cutting rhetoric. In
these respects it goes beyond even the Protagoras, a dialogue
that depicts a hostile confrontation between Socrates and the renowned
sophist by the same
name.[25]
The quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric shows itself as an ugly
fight in the Gorgias.

What is the fight about? Socrates asks Gorgias to define what it is
that he does, that is, to define rhetoric. And he asks him to do it in
a way that helps to distinguish rhetorical from philosophical
discourse: the former produces speeches of praise and blame, the
latter answers questions through the give and take of discussion
(dialegesthai, 448d10) in an effort to arrive at a concise
definition, and more broadly, with the intent to understand the
subject. The philosopher is happy to be refuted if that leads to
better understanding; wisdom, and not just striving to
“win” the argument, is the goal (457e-458a).

Gorgias is forced by successive challenges to move from the view that
rhetoric is concerned with words (speeches) to the view that its
activity and effectiveness happen only in and through words (unlike
the manual arts) to the view that its object is the greatest of human
concerns, namely freedom. Rhetoric is “the source of freedom for
humankind itself and at the same time it is for each person the source
of rule over others in one's own city” (452d6–8). This
freedom is a kind of power produced by the ability to persuade others
to do one's bidding; “rhetoric is a producer of persuasion. Its
whole business comes to that, and that's the long and short of
it” (453a2–3). But persuasion about what exactly? Gorgias'
answer is: about matters concerning justice and injustice (454b7). But
surely there are two kinds of persuasion, one that instills beliefs
merely, and another that produces knowledge; it is the former only
with which rhetoric is concerned. The analogy of this argument to the
critique of poetry is already clear; in both cases, Socrates wants to
argue that the speaker is not a truth speaker, and does not convey
knowledge to his audience. As already noted, Socrates classifies
poetry (dithyrambic and tragic poetry are named) as a species of
rhetoric. Its goal is to gratify and please the spectator, or
differently put, it is just a kind of flattery. Strip away the rhythm
and meter, and you have plain prose directed at the mob. It's a kind
of public speaking, that's all (502a6-c12).

The rhetorician is a maker of beliefs in the souls of his auditors
(455a3–4). And without that skill—here Gorgias begins to
wax at length and eloquently—other arts (such as medicine)
cannot do their work effectively (456b ff.). Rhetoric is a
comprehensive art. But Gorgias offers a crucial qualification that
turns out to contribute to his downfall: rhetoric should not be used
against any and everybody, any more than skill in boxing should be.
Although the rhetorician teaches others to use the skill justly, it is
always possible for the student to misuse it. This is followed by
another damaging admission: the rhetorician knows what justice,
injustice, and other moral qualities are, and teaches them to the
student if the student is ignorant of them (460a). It would follow
that, in Socrates' language, the true rhetorician is a philosopher;
and in fact that is a position Socrates takes in the
Phaedrus. But Gorgias is not a philosopher and does not in
fact know—cannot give an account of—the moral qualities in
question. So his art is all about appearing, in the eyes of the
ignorant, to know about these topics, and then persuading them as is
expedient (cf. 459d-e). But this is not something Gorgias wishes to
admit; indeed, he allows himself to agree that since the rhetorician
knows what justice is, he must be a just man and therefore acts justly
(460b-c). He is caught in a contradiction: he claimed that a student
who had acquired the art of rhetoric could use it unjustly, but now
claims that the rhetorician could not commit injustice.

All this is just too much for Gorgias' student Polus, whose angry
intervention marks the second and much more bitter stage of the
dialogue (461b3). A new point emerges that is consistent with the
claim that rhetoricians do not know or convey knowledge, viz. that it
is not an art or craft (techne) but a mere knack
(empeiria, or experience). Socrates adds that its object is
to produce gratification. To develop the point, Socrates produces a
striking schema distinguishing between care of the body and care of
the soul. Medicine and gymnastics truly care for the body, cookery and
cosmetics pretend to but do not. Politics is the art that cares for
the soul; justice and legislation are its branches, and the imitations
of each are rhetoric and sophistry. As medicine stands to cookery, so
justice to rhetoric; as gymnastics to cosmetics, so legislation to
sophistry. The true forms of caring are arts (technai) aiming
at the good; the false, knacks aiming at pleasure (464b-465d). Let us
note that sophistry and rhetoric are very closely allied here;
Socrates notes that they are distinct but closely related and
therefore often confused by people (465c). What exactly their
distinction consists in is not clear, either in Plato's discussions of
the matter, or historically. Socrates's polemic here is intended to
apply to them both, as both are (alleged) to amount to a knack for
persuasion of the ignorant by the ignorant with a view to producing
pleasure in the audience and the pleasures of power for the
speaker.

Socrates' ensuing argument with Polus is complicated and long. The nub
of the matter concerns the relation between power and justice. For
Polus, the person who has power and wields it successfully is happy.
For Socrates, a person is happy only if he or she is (morally) good,
and an unjust or evil person is wretched—all the more so,
indeed, if they escape punishment for their misdeeds. Polus finds this
position “absurd” (473a1), and challenges Socrates to take
a poll of all present to confirm the point. In sum: Plato's suggestion
is that rhetoric and sophistry are tied to substantive theses about
the irrelevance of moral truth to the happy life; about the
conventionality or relativity of morals; and about the irrelevance of
the sort of inquiry into the truth of the matter (as distinguished
from opinions or the results of polls) upon which Socrates keeps
insisting. Socrates argues for some of his most famous theses along
the way, such as the view that “the one who does what's unjust
is always more miserable than the one who suffers it, and the one who
avoids paying what's due always more miserable than the one who does
pay it” (479e4–6). And if these hold, what use is there in
rhetoric? For someone who wishes to avoid doing himself and others
harm, Socrates concludes, rhetoric is altogether useless. Tied into
logical knots, Polus succumbs.

All this is just too much for yet another interlocutor in the
dialogue, Callicles. The rhetoric of the Gorgias reaches its
most bitter stage. Callicles presents himself as a no-holds-barred,
bare-knuckled, clear-headed advocate of Realpolitik, as we
would now call it. Telling it like it is, he draws a famous
distinction between nature and convention, and advances a thesis
familiar to readers of Republic books I and II: “But I
believe that nature itself reveals that it's a just thing for the
better man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the
worse man and the less capable man. Nature shows that this is so in
many places; both among the other animals and in whole cities and
races of men, it shows that this is what justice has been decided to
be: that the superior rule the inferior and have a greater share than
they” (483c8-d6). This is the “law of nature”
(483e3; perhaps the first occurrence in Western philosophy of this
famous phrase). Conventional talk of justice, fairness, not taking
more than is your share, not pursuing your individual best
interest—these are simply ways by which the weak seek to enslave
the strong. The art of rhetoric is all about empowering those who are
strong by nature to master the weak by nature.

Callicles' famous diatribe includes an indictment of philosophy as a
childish occupation that, if pursued past youth, interferes with the
manly pursuit of power, fosters contemptible ignorance of how the real
political world works, and renders its possessor effeminate and
defenseless. His example is none other than Socrates; philosophy will
(he says prophetically) render Socrates helpless should he be
indicted. Helplessness in the face of the stupidity of the hoi
polloi is disgraceful and pathetic (486a-c). By contrast, what
would it mean to have power? Callicles is quite explicit: power is the
ability to fulfill whatever desire you have. Power is freedom, freedom
is license (492a-c). The capacity to do what one wants is fulfillment
in the sense of the realization of pleasure. Rhetoric is a means to
that end.

The quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, thus understood,
ultimately addresses a range of fundamental issues.
“Rhetoric” is taken here to constitute an entire world
view. Its quarrel with philosophy is comprehensive, and bears on the
nature of nature; the existence of objective moral norms; the
connection (if any) between happiness and virtue; the nature and
limits of reason; the value of reason (understood as the rational
pursuit of objective purpose) in a human life; the nature of the soul
or self; and the question as to whether there is a difference between
true and false pleasure, i.e., whether pleasure is the good. It is
striking that while Socrates wants to contrast
“rhetorical” speech-making with his own approach of
philosophical dialogue, in practice the differences blur. Socrates too
starts to speak at length, sounds rhetorical at times, and ends the
discussion with a myth. Callicles advances a substantive position
(grounded in a version of the distinction between nature and
convention) and defends it. These transgressions of rhetorical genres
to one side, from Socrates' standpoint the ultimate philosophical
question at stake concerns how one should live one's life (500c). Is
the life of “politics,” understood as the pursuit of power
and glory, superior to the life of philosophy?

Readers of the dialogue will differ as to whether or not the arguments
there offered decide the matter. The nub of the debate is as current
today, both in academic and non-academic contexts, as it was in
Plato's
day.[26]
Even though poetry is here cast as a species of rhetoric, a good deal
of work would have to be done to show that the substantive theses to
which poetry is committed, according to the Republic, are the
same as the substantive theses to which rhetoric is committed,
according to the Gorgias.

Is all of rhetoric bad? Are we to avoid—indeed, can we
avoid—rhetoric altogether? Even in the Gorgias, as we
have seen, there is a distinction between rhetoric that instills
belief, and rhetoric that instills knowledge, and later in the
dialogue a form of noble rhetoric is mentioned, though no examples of
its practitioners can be found (503a-b). The Phaedrus offers
a more detailed explanation of this distinction.

Readers of the Phaedrus have often wondered how the dialogue
hangs together. The first “half” seems to be about love,
and the second about rhetoric. A slightly closer look reveals that any
such simple characterization is misleading, because the first half is
also about rhetoric, in several different ways. To begin with, the
first half of the dialogue contains explicit reflections on rhetoric;
for example, Socrates draws the distinction between what we would call
the “form” and the “content” of a discourse
(235a). Still further, it consists in part in three speeches, at least
the first of which (“Lysias' speech”) is a rhetorical
set-piece. The other two are rhetorical as well, and presented as
efforts to persuade a young beloved. All three are justly viewed as
rhetorical masterstrokes by Plato, but for different reasons. The
first is a brilliantly executed parody of the style of Lysias (an
orator and speech writer of significant repute). The second speech
simultaneously preserves aspects of its fictional frame (the first was
a paradoxical sounding address by a “non-lover” to a
“beloved”), develops that frame (the non-lover is
transformed into a concealed lover), and deepens the themes in an
impressive and philosophically enlightening way. The third (referred
to as the “palinode” or recantation speech) contains some
of the most beautiful and powerful images in all of Greek literature.
It is mostly an allegory cast in the form of a myth, and tells the
story of true love and of the soul's journeys in the cosmos human and
divine. That is, the rhetoric of the great palinode is markedly
“poetic.” Especially noteworthy for present purposes is
the fact that the theme of inspiration is repeatedly invoked in the
first half of the dialogue; poetic inspiration is explicitly
discussed.[27]

The themes of poetry and rhetoric, then, are intertwined in the
Phaedrus. It looks initially as though both rhetoric and
poetry have gained significant stature, at least relative to their
status in the Ion, Republic, and Gorgias. I
will begin by focusing primarily on rhetoric, and then turn to the
question of poetry, even though the two themes are closely connected
in this dialogue.

The second “half” of the dialogue does not discuss the
nature of love thematically, at any length, but it does in effect
propose that discourse prompted by the love of
wisdom—philosophy—is true rhetoric. As the conversation
between one “lover of speeches” (228c1–2) and
another evolves, the three rhetorical speeches of the first part of
the dialogue are examined from the perspective of their rhetorical
artlessness or artfulness. Poetry is once again cast as a kind of
speech making (258b3) and, very importantly, Socrates declares that
“It's not speaking or writing well that's shameful; what's
really shameful is to engage in either of them shamefully or
badly”
(258d4–5).[28]
The proffering of discourses is not in and of itself shameful; what
then constitutes honorable speech making?

The answer to this crucial question constitutes one of the most famous
contributions to the topic. In essence, Socrates argues that someone
who is going to speak well and nobly must know the truth about the
subject he is going to discuss. The sort of theory Polus and Callicles
maintained in the Gorgias is false (see Phaedrus
259e4–260a4). In order to make good on this sweeping claim,
Socrates argues that rhetoric is an “art” (techne), and
not just artless practice (the equivalent of the
“empeiria” for which rhetoric was condemned in the
Gorgias). How to show that it is an art after all? Quite a
number of claimants to rhetoric are named and reviewed, and readers
who have an interest in the history of Greek rhetoric rightly find
these passages invaluable. We are told here that the extant manuals of
rhetoric offer the “preliminaries” to the true art of
rhetoric, not the thing itself (269b7–8).

Many rhetoricians have artfully and effectively misled their
audiences, and Socrates argues—somewhat implausibly
perhaps—that in order to mislead one cannot oneself be
misled.[29]
An artful speech exhibits its artfulness in its structure, one
that—since in the best case it embodies the truth—retraces
or mirrors the natural divisions of the subject matter itself. It will
not only be coherent, but structured in a way that mirrors the way the
subject itself is naturally organized. In one of Socrates' most famous
images, a good composition should exhibit the organic unity of a
living creature, “with a body of its own; it must be neither
without head nor without legs; and it must have a middle and
extremities that are fitting both to one another and to the whole
work” (264c1–5). This will not be truly accomplished if it
only looks that way; to be that way, a discourse's
unity should reflect the unity of its subject.

At this point we might want to ask about the audience; after
all, the rhetorician is trying to persuade someone of something. Might
not the speaker know the truth of the matter, and know how to embody
it artfully in a composition, but fail to persuade anyone of it? Would
not a failure to persuade indicate that the speaker lacks the complete
art of rhetoric? Socrates in effect responds to this question by
postulating that the successful speaker must also know the nature of
the human soul, else his skill is just “empeiria” (the
term from the Gorgias again) rather than “techne”
(270b6). Just as an expert physician must understand both the human
body and the body of medical knowledge—these being
inseparable—so too the expert speaker must understand both the
human soul and what is known about the soul. The reader will
immediately recall that the great speech (the palinode) in the first
half of the Phaedrus was about the soul in its cosmic
context—the soul's nature, its journeys divine and human, its
longings, the objects of its longings, its failures and their
consequences, were all part of the same story. Thus it is not
surprising that when defining the art of rhetoric Socrates suggests
that we cannot “reach a serious understanding of the nature of
the soul without understanding the nature of the world as a
whole” (270c1–2). The consequence of this approach to
rhetoric has now become clear: to possess that art, one must be a
philosopher. True rhetoric is philosophical discourse.

But what happened to the question about the audience? “The
soul” is not the addressee of a rhetorical discourse. Socrates
responds that the artful rhetorician must also know what the types of
soul are, what sorts of speeches “work” on each type, and
be able to identify which type is being addressed on the given
occasion. This last demand is a matter of practice and of the ability
to size up the audience on the spot, as it were. The requirements of
the true art of rhetoric, which Socrates also calls the “art of
dialectic” (276e5–6), are very high indeed. (The reader
will find them summarized at 277b5-c6).

If the audience is philosophical, or includes philosophers, how would
the true, artful, philosophical dialectician address it? This question
is not faced head-on in the Phaedrus, but we are given a
number of clues. They are introduced by means of a myth—by a
kind of “poetry,” if you will—and they help us
understand the sort of discourse a philosopher will on the whole wish
to avoid, namely that which is written. According to
reflections inaugurated by the Theuth and Thamus myth, the written
word is not the most suitable vehicle for communicating truth, because
it cannot answer questions put to it; it simply repeats itself when
queried; it tends to substitute the authority of the author for the
reader's open minded inquiry into the truth; and it circulates
everywhere indiscriminately, falling into the hands of people who
cannot understand it. Very importantly, it interferes with true
“recollection” (anamnesis, 249c2), that process
described at length and (for the most part) poetically in the
dialogue's “palinode,” by which the knowledge latent in
the soul is brought out through question and answer (274d-275b).
Writing is a clumsy medium, and thus would not match the potential
effectiveness of philosophical give and take, the “Socratic
dialogue” which best leads the philosophical mind to truth. This
desirable rhetoric is “a discourse that is written down, with
knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it
knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain
silent” (276a5–7). Dialectical speech is accompanied by
knowledge, can defend itself when questioned, and is productive of
knowledge in its audience (276e4–277a4). Of course, all this
raises the question as to the status of Plato's dialogues, since they
are themselves writings; we will return to it briefly below.

Rhetoric is the art of “directing the soul by means of
speech” (261a8). Popular rhetoric is not an art, but a knack for
persuasion. Artful rhetoric requires philosophy; but does philosophy
require rhetoric? Why must philosophical discourse—say, as
exemplified in “Socratic dialogue”—have anything to
do with rhetoric? The Phaedrus points to the interesting
thought that all discourse is rhetorical, even when the
speaker is simply trying to communicate the truth—indeed, true
rhetoric is the art of communicating the truth (notice the broad sweep
of the discussion of discourse at 277e5–278b4). Rhetoric is
present wherever and whenever people speak (261d10-e4 and context).
Even when one is not sure what the truth is, and even when one is
thinking through something by oneself—carrying on an inner
dialogue, as it were—discourse and persuasion are
present.[30]
Of course, a philosopher will question assertions that he or she
ought to persuaded of X; but that questioning too, the
Phaedrus suggests, is part of a process aimed at warranted
persuasion, and inevitably involves a mix of the
“persuadability” of the philosopher on the one hand, and
the truth (or falsity) of the claims on the other. The bottom line is
that there is no escaping from persuasion, and so none from
rhetoric—including of course from the very problem of
distinguishing between warranted and unwarranted persuasion.
Self-deception is an ever-present possibility (as Socrates implies
here, and notes at Cratylus 428d). That is a problem about
which the philosopher above all worries about. It is always a question
of “directing the soul by means of speech,” even where
it's a matter of the soul directing or leading itself (or to use a
phrase from earlier in the dialogue, moving itself
(245e)).[31]

The Gorgias' notion that the struggle between (popular)
rhetoric and philosophy—or as we might say, unphilosophical and
philosophical rhetoric—is one between comprehensive outlooks is
clear from the Phaedrus as well. The “great
speech” or palinode of the dialogue illustrates the character
and range of views upon which the project of philosophical rhetoric
(of philosophy, in short) is built. The speech is quite explicitly a
retraction of an outlook that does not espouse these views; ordinary
rhetoric moves in a very different moral, metaphysical, psychological,
and epistemic world. It is an interesting fact that Plato deploys
certain elements of poetry (such as myth, allegory, simile, image) in
drawing the contrast between these outlooks.

That poetry is itself a kind of persuasive discourse or rhetoric has
already been mentioned. It comes as no surprise to read that Socrates
indicts rhapsodes on the grounds that their speeches proceed
“without questioning and explanation” and “are given
only in order to produce conviction” (277e8–9). This
echoes the Ion's charge that the rhapsodes do not know what
they are talking about. But what about the rationale that the poets
and rhapsodes are inspired?

Inspiration comes up numerous times in the Phaedrus. It and
the related notions of Bacchic frenzy, madness, and possession are
invoked repeatedly almost from the start of the dialogue (228b), in
connection with Phaedrus' allegedly inspiring recitation of Lysias'
text (234d1–6), and as inspiring Socrates's two speeches
(237a7–b1, 262d2–6, 263d1–3). These references are
uniformly playful, even at times joking. More serious is the
distinction between ordinary madness and divine madness, and the
defense of the superiority of divine madness, which Socrates' second
speech sets out to defend. In particular, he sets out to show that the
madness of love or eros “is given us by the gods to ensure our
greatest good fortune” (245b7-c1). The case is first made by
noting that three species of madness are already accepted: that of the
prophets, that of certain purifying or cathartic religious rites, and
the third that inspiration granted by the Muses that moves its
possessor to poetry (244b-245a). As noted, it begins to look as though
a certain kind of poetry (the inspired) is being rehabilitated.

And yet when Socrates comes to classify kinds of lives a bit further
on, the poets (along with those who have anything to do with
mimesis) rank a low sixth out of nine, after the likes of
household managers, financiers, doctors, and prophets (248e1–2)!
The poet is just ahead of the manual laborer, sophist, and tyrant. The
philosopher comes in first, as the criterion for the ranking concerns
the level of knowledge of truth about the Ideas or Forms of which the
soul in question is capable. This hierarchy of lives could scarcely be
said to rehabilitate the poet. The Phaedrus quietly sustains
the critique of poetry, as well as (much less quietly) of
rhetoric.

Plato's critique of writing on the grounds that it is a poor form of
rhetoric is itself written. Of course, his Socrates does not know that
he is “speaking” in the context of a written dialogue; but
the reader immediately discerns the puzzle. Does the critique apply to
the dialogues themselves? If not, do the dialogues escape the critique
altogether, or meet it in part (being inferior to “live”
dialogue, but not liable to the full force of Socrates' criticisms)?
Scholars dispute the answers to these well-known
questions.[32]

There is general agreement that Plato perfected—perhaps even
invented—a new form of discourse. The Platonic dialogue is a
innovative type of rhetoric, and it is hard to believe that it does
not at all reflect—whether successfully or not is another
matter—Plato's response to the criticisms of writing which he
puts into the mouth of his Socrates.

Plato's remarkable philosophical rhetoric incorporates elements of
poetry. Most obviously, his dialogues are dramas with several formal
features in common with much tragedy and comedy (for example, the use
of authorial irony, the importance of plot, setting, the role of
individual character and the interplay between dramatis
personae). No character called “Plato” ever says a
word in his texts. His works also narrate a number of myths, and
sparkle with imagery, simile, allegory, and snatches of meter and
rhyme. Indeed, as he sets out the city in speech in the
Republic, Socrates calls himself a myth teller
(376d9–10, 501e4–5). In a number of ways, the dialogues
may be said to be works of fiction; none of them took place exactly as
presented by Plato, several could not have taken place, some contain
characters who never existed. These are imaginary conversations,
imitations of certain kinds of philosophical conversations. The reader
is undoubtedly invited to see him or herself reflected in various
characters, and to that extent identify with them, even while also
focusing on the arguments, exchanges, and speeches. Readers of Plato
often refer to the “literary” dimension of his writings,
or simply refer to them as a species of philosophical literature.
Exactly what to make of his appropriation of elements of poetry is
once again a matter of long discussion and
controversy.[33]

Suffice it to say that Plato's last word on the critique of poetry and
rhetoric is not spoken in his dialogues, but is embodied in the
dialogue form of writing he brought to perfection.

–––, 2008, “Reading and Writing
Plato,” Philosophy and Literature, 32: 205–216.
Article review of: R. Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato's
Dialogues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; K.
Corrigan and E. Glazov-Corrigan, Plato's Dialectic at Play:
Argument, Structure, and Myth in the Symposium, University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004; D. Hyland, Questioning
Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato, Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2004; D. Nails, The People of Plato:
a Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics, Indianapolis:
Hackett, 2002.

Moravcsik, J. and P. Temko (eds.), 1982, Plato on Beauty,
Wisdom, and the Arts, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. [Note:
this volume contains a number of essays especially relevant to the
theme of the present entry.]

Morgan, K., 2000, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to
Plato, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Nicola Moore for her help with the Bibliography, and
to Richard Kraut, Marina McCoy, and Stephen Scully for their excellent
comments on drafts of the text. I would also like to thank David
Roochnik for his help with various revisions along the way.